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<title>With His Song (or Drain The Blood, The Heart Is Wise) by DeadCaffeineJunkie</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26205061">With His Song (or Drain The Blood, The Heart Is Wise)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadCaffeineJunkie/pseuds/DeadCaffeineJunkie'>DeadCaffeineJunkie</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Old Guard (Movie 2020)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood, Gore, Impermanent Character Death, Intimacy, Knives, Love Language, M/M, No Dialogue, Romance, Violence, liberal abuse of metaphors and similies, romantic and Romantic, the mortifying ordeal of not being known enough, un-beta'd</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:54:57</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>963</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26205061</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadCaffeineJunkie/pseuds/DeadCaffeineJunkie</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing about being eternal lovers is, eventually there comes a point where you can't get any deeper.<br/>This is Joe and Nicky going deeper.</p><p>Alternative summary: Joe and Nicky's love language is murder.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>76</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>With His Song (or Drain The Blood, The Heart Is Wise)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title from a song by the Fugees (that's an easter egg if anyone gets it) and 'Drain the Blood' by the Distillers.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Sometimes close friends start to mirror each other’s speech patterns and finish each other’s sentences. Couples that have been together for years seem to begin to look like each other; time and familiarity result in an unconscious mimicry of subtle facial movements and expressions that gave the impression of similarity. </p><p>After a few years together it was easy for one person to anticipate the needs of the other in a way that seems telepathic, so what happens when a couple have been together for centuries? </p><p>The relationship between Joe and Nicky had always been passionate, as fervent in the way they’d slain each other for years as the way they kissed years later once their relationship had shifted. </p><p>They’d been together for longer than any one human lifetime and the intimacy between them was (almost) unprecedented. They knew each other so well it was as though they’d mapped each smooth surface inside each other’s skulls and every path and chamber through each other’s hearts. </p><p>They knew the taste of each other as well as the taste of their own mouths, each other’s sounds like their own heartbeats and the way they moved together through the world was as though one was an extension of the other. It was as complete as two people could be intertwined but it wasn’t enough. </p><p>They hungered for more, for deeper, for something beyond the mortal forms of love that their lives and bodies weren’t tied to anymore. They spent days at a time, slick and hot and animal in bed, frustrated into biting bleeding teeth marks into each other’s collarbones and the insides of their thighs, the soft inside of the arm. They fucked with their foreheads pressed together, panting against each other’s mouths with a desperation to manifest what they felt in their souls and failing.</p><p>It was like a relationship over a long distance, only this yawning gap couldn’t be crossed by plane or car or train. They came a little closer when they were joined in body, one’s thumb pressed against the other’s pulse and the feel of life vital and immediate shared between them. It still wasn’t enough. It was never enough. </p><p>The first time they did it was an accident. They had no fear of death, not then, not when the only cautionary tale they had was of a man they’d never known. What was death to them who had killed each other for years? What pain lay in death for men who burned with the raw agony of a love they couldn’t express?</p><p>They’d been so reticent towards each other at first in a way that seemed foreign when they thought about it now: it seemed that there had never been a time when they hadn’t been able to read each other hands on, like their own form of Braille. Now they were at the point where reading wasn’t enough anymore. </p><p>They hadn’t been having sex the first time around and they found that they didn’t need to in order to find an intimacy that came as close to merging their nervous systems as they could get. Their lives were unique, impossible, of course they’d need something impossible to connect. </p><p>The first time was messy and dripping in guilt and frantic apologies for a bite that had gone a little too deep, an almost inevitability with bodies that had forgotten the permanence and gravity of damage. When the action was returned, not as an act of vengeance, but of generosity, they realised they had found something that quietened the frenzy of distance inside them like a kiss. </p><p>They had practised this until it was smooth and certain like the curve of Joe’s scimitar or the precision of Nicky’s kill shot. </p><p>They lay curled together in bed the way they always did, even if this wasn’t something they’d always do; Nicky tilted his head up and back against Joe’s shoulder, Joe’s knee gently bent and nudging into the back of Nicky’s thigh, bare skin and white bed sheets. </p><p>There’s was a romantic life, a Romantic life, and they had special tools for nights like this. An identical pair of small stiletto knives, plain and un-fancy but sharpened to the extent that each cut felt like the slip of silk before the sting of pain could set in.</p><p>Nicky would curl his hand back, his knuckles riding the hard curves of Joe’s leg from his knee and up to lie against the flank of Joe’s inner thigh, the knife in his hand resting against Joe’s skin with equal reverence.</p><p>He turned his hand with enough life left in him to dig in and cut through skin and muscle to sever Joe’s femoral artery, just as Joe drew his own blade tender and deep through Nicky’s throat and his carotid. It wasn’t about bearing witness. </p><p>Blood burst from the careful wounds, body-hot and beating in rushed time with their struggling hearts. </p><p>The sheets were sodden within minutes. </p><p>Blood wicked through the fibres.<br/>
Blood pooled in the places on the bed where their bodies made imprints on the surface.<br/>
Blood dripped from the bedding onto the wooden floors making stains that would never truly be scrubbed out.</p><p>The smell of it hung in the air, the heavy meaty stink of butcher shops, of slaughterhouses and battlefields.</p><p>It hurt, losing so much blood. It was an excruciating way to die, but maybe that was what made it work. </p><p>When they came back, shuddering and clawing in breath it was almost as one organism, born in unity.</p><p>They’d lie where they were, almost still, maybe nuzzling in a little closer, maybe shifting together a little more, and they’d fall asleep where they lay, in blood, in gore, in love.</p><p>Simultaneous mortal wounds. They had never been closer.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'm not a medical professional or biologist, descriptions of bleeding out are probably not 100% accurate.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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